"My Mind's Not Right": the Legacy of Robert Lowell

WILLIAM DORESKI "My Mind's Not Right": the Legacy of Robert Lowell In a pointedly unsympathetic introduction to a collection of essays on Robert Lowell, Harold Bloom names Lowell's particular contribution as the origination of the trope ofvulnerability and the subsequent fostering of the "Confessional" school ofpoetry, and then argues that more than ten years after his death, Lowell's influence, due to the numbing effects of this trope, is less than one would have supposed: From Life Studies (1959) on, Lowell took up his own revisionary version of William Carlos Williams's rhetorical stance as a defense against his own precursors, T S. Eliot and Allen Tate. This stance, which is in Williams a fiction of nakedness, becomes in Lowell the ttope of vulnerability. The trope, once influential and fashionable, has become the mark of a school of poets who now seem writers of period pieces: the "Confessional " school of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, the earlier W D. Snodgrass, the later work of John Berryman. (1) Bloom correctly names the rhetorical figuration that distinguishes much of Lowell's most important poetry from that of his predecessor poets, but discounts this originality by over-privileging Lowell's indebtedness and struggles with his poetic father-figures, underestimating the range of knowledge made available by the trope ofvulnerability, and insisting that the influence of Ashbery, for example, now looms much larger than Lowell's. Atguing furthet and exposing his own vulnerability, Bloom claims that "Elizabeth Bishop is now firmly established as the enduring artist of Lowell's generation, since the canonical sequence of Arizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 3, Autumn 1993 Copyright © 1 993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 94William Doreski our poetry seems to many among us, myself included, to move from Stevens through Bishop on to James Merrill and John Ashbery, whose extraordinary works of the last decade are a range beyond anything in Lowell Ot Berryman" (2). The shallowness of this appeal to the canon seems obvious enough, but the purpose of this essay is not to measure Lowell's status against Ashbery's, Bishop's, or anyone else's. Rathet I wish to demonstrate that the trope of vulnerability, given distinct voice by Lowell, remains a central rhetorical motif in contemporary poetry, and indeed is most alive in the work of some of the best poets now in mid-career, including poets Bloom habitually singles out for praise. This essay will consider how Lowell constructs this key trope, using as examples two poems from different parts ofhis career, "Skunk Hour," from Life Studies, and "For John Berryman" from Day by Day. I will then demonstrate how similar rhetorical elements, configured in psycholinguistic narratives of exposure and withdrawal, shape A. R. Amnions' poem "Easter Morning" and John Ashbery's "Sighs and Inhibitions," and will conclude with a btief discussion of Louise Gliick's "Snow" to suggest how a younger generation of poets, just entering mid-careei and middle age, has begun to build upon Lowell's example. Critics have commonly described Ammons as a neo-romantic concerned with the interface between the worlds of nature and cultute. Bloom calls him a poet of the "Romantic Sublime" (Figures 220), and Robert Pinsky comments that Ammons's poetry makes "a difficult marriage of poetics Ot epistemology with natural description: the fluid landscape and the poet's repeated definition of his own role in relation to that flux" (150). The marriage, however, never quite consummates itself , and the ttope of vulnerability exposes the rhetorical gap between the recalcitrant parties. Ashbery, on the other hand, has struck most critics (including Bloom) as a direct descendent of Wallace Stevens, whose tevision of high Romanticism critiques the generalized, composite voice of Poetry described by Mary Jacobus as "disembodied sound" (181), and offers a voice that while resisting autobiography makes certain "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" available (Stevens 130). Bloom places Ashbety, a much-belated romantic, in descent from Emerson , Whitman, and Stevens as a poet of the 'American Sublime" (Figures 199). Ashbery is certainly indebted to Stevens and Whitman, but in many ofhis poems the trope ofvulnerability lends an air ofself-deprecating irony, a fostering of personal presence different from that found...